Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/720

714 struggle with each other? Certainly not for happiness, but for power. Pain as an obstacle to man's will for power is a normal fact, the normal ingredient of every organic occurrence. Man does not avoid pain, he needs it; every victory, every feeling of pleasure, every occurrence, presupposes a resistance overcome. The psychologists have not distinguished between the pleasure of falling asleep and the pleasure of victory. The exhausted want rest, they want to stretch out their weary bones, they want peace and quiet—it is the happiness of the nihilistic religions and philosophies. The robust and active natures desire victory, they want to overcome opponents, to extend the feeling of power over wider areas than before. All healthy functions of the organism have this need—and the whole organism is such a complexus of systems striving for the increase of the feelings of power. "To be preoccupied with oneself and one's everlasting salvation is not the expression of a perfect and self-confident nature, for such a nature doesn't care a straw whether it is to be blessed or not—it has no such interest in happiness of any kind, it is power, action, desire—it puts its impress upon things."

Life in short is hard and cruel and can not help being so; it is full of suffering. But we must not only learn to suffer ourselves, we must learn to see others suffer, yes to make them suffer where it is necessary. "Who can achieve anything great unless he feels the power and the will in himself to inflict great pains? The ability to suffer pain is the very least; weak women and even slaves often become masters in this. But not to perish of grief and distrust when we inflict great suffering and hear the cry of anguish—that is great, that is a part of greatness."

We must not only bear suffering in ourselves and be brave enough to inflict it upon others; we must not pity it. Schopenhauer had made pity or sympathy the sole basis and standard of morality, because it is the negation of the selfish will to live. For that very reason Nietzsche repudiates pity. In the first place pity is by no means so disinterested and admirable a feeling as the moralists make it. The weakling pities those who are beneath him, who do not compete with him, whom he need not fear—it increases his self-love to pity. Pity is the virtue of mediocre souls. Pity is one of the saddest symptoms of decline. Moreover pity crosses the law of evolution which is the law of selection. It preserves what is ripe for destruction. Suffering itself becomes contagious through pity. It augments misery and preserves everything that is miserable, and so becomes the chief means for intensifying decadence. "What is falling we should even push down." "Oh my brothers, am I then cruel? But I say: what is falling we should even push down! All these things of to-day—they are all falling, they are all decaying; who would keep them from it? But—I would even push them. And him whom you do not teach to fly, why teach him—to fall